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Games Are “Serious Business” 8/24/08! Games are “serious business”! • Facts from www.esa.org:! – $7.4 billion revenues in 2006! – Average player is 33 years old and! has been playing for 12 years! – 36% percent of American parents play computer! – 80% percent of gamer parents play with their kids! • From Blizzard press release:! World of Warcraft surpasses! Lecture 1: Introduction! 10 million subscribers in January 2008! – $13 to $15 monthly (for 2.5 million in U.S. at least)! Prof. Aaron Lanterman! – Do the math!!!! School of Electrical and Computer Engineering! • Stephen Johnson, “Everything Bad ! Georgia Institute of Technology! is Good for You: How Today's Popular! Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter”! Screenshot from! www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/imageviewer.html?,images/screenshots/,65,241,! 2! Our MPG class fills an industry need! The realities of real-time! • “CPU/GPU programming skill is the biggest hole they have. They • The architectures we will look at are driven by real-time can't find students who can do it well.” - Prof. Blair MacIntyre! constraints! • “The biggest challenge facing game companies right now is the – 60 frames per second! problem of writing multithreaded code that fully supports the – 1/60 " 16.7 milliseconds! multiple-core architectures of the latest PCs and the next – Average performance is irrelevant; it’s the max that matters ! generation game consoles.” - Jeremy Reimer, “Valve goes multicore”! • In contrast, most scientific applications can be handled • “If a programming genius like John Carmack can be so “offline”! befuddled by mysterious issues coming from multithreaded – Computers historically designed to work well in “batch mode”! programming, what chance do mere mortals have?” - Jeremy Reimer, “Cross-platform game development and the next generation of consoles”! • We may briefly discuss exploiting this kind of hardware for scientific applications! http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/valve-multicore.ars! – GPGPU movement! http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/crossplatform.ars! – Sony’s folding@home! 3! 4! 1! 8/24/08! This is NOT a course on game design, or…! This is only partially a graphics course ! • See CS4455: Video Game Design! • No background in computer graphics required!! – Founded by Amy Bruckman in 1998! – Make sure class is accessible to ECE majors! • See CS4731: Game AI for the real deal on AI! • We will review a minimal amount of necessary background! – But we may dabble in AI just a little bit ! – Geometric transformations, backface culling, clipping, rasterization, lighting, texture mapping, etc.! • Also won’t be talking about…! • Emphasis will be on real-time graphics! – Handheld game devices! • That may change in the future!! • We won’t be talking about things like…! – “Alternative” controllers! – Perception! – Networking issues (LAN parties, MMORPGs, etc.)! – Global illumination: ray tracing, radiosity, photon mapping! – Prototyping, user testing! • Although people are experimenting with putting such algorithms on GPUs!! – Societal impact of games! – Advanced animation techniques: inverse kinematics! – Gender and games! • See CS3451/CS6491: Computer Graphics, CS4496/CS7496: – Business issues (organizational issues of large teams, etc.)! Computer Animation, CS4475: Computational Photography, • May incidentally touch upon some of the above issues! CS4480 Digital Video Special FX ! 5! 6! This is WILL be a course on…! Then vs. Now! • Emphasis will be on games that simulate and depict “realistic” animated 3-D environments! • In the early days of computer games, the – Algorithms! “designer” and the “programmer” were often one – Architectures! and the same! – Programming paradigms! • Practical target platforms! • Nowadays there are usually separate positions of – Xbox 360! – Playstation 3! “producer,” “lead designer,” “lead artist,” “lead – Windows PCs with NVIDIA or ATI graphics cards! programmer,” etc.! – …and maybe taste of Playstation 2! • Future target platforms! – Intel’s Larabee! • What about the Wii?! 7! 8! 2! 8/24/08! Two recurring themes! Taking a broad view of “video games”! • Commercial game industry is brutal! • Theme 1: Hardware features influence game – Nov. 2004: “EA Spouse” post (ea-spouse.livejournal.com)! design ! – Some companies get hundreds of resumes per week per listing! – If the Atari 400 gives you 4 sprites, you’ll naturally find (www.gamasutra.com/features/20050711/mcshaffry_01.shtml)! something to do with those 4 sprites! • Think “outside the box” a bit! – If a Playstation 3 can push a gazillion polygons, – Computer engineering! developers feel obligated to provide a gazillion polygons! • Nothing is driving technological develop as fast as gaming! • Gaming experience gives future computer engineers insight! • Driving budgets through the roof! • Maybe you’ll work for NVIDIA or ATI?! • 100 person teams - 30 programmers, 70 artists! • Maybe you’ll work for Intel, AMD, or IBM?! • Trend not sustainable!! • Maybe you’ll help design the Playstation 4 or Xbox 720?! • With all the emphasis on 3-D realism, could great games like – “Game” programming/design: think beyond the commercial industry! Ms. Pac-Man or Balance of Power be made today?! – Scientific potential of GPGPU! – Even if you never program any “games,” multicore is the future! • Theme 2: Sufficient cleverness can sometimes • That all said - we’d be totally thrilled if you got a job at overcome hardware limitations! Insomniac, Bungie, Blizzard, Activision, LucasArts, etc.! 9! 10! Many opportunities for independent developers! Consoles hostile territory for indie developers (1)! • On-line distribution ! • To sell games on a console, you still must pass – Takes manufacturing costs out of the equation! the gatekeepers at Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo! – “Brick & mortar” stores have limited shelf space - on-line services like Amazon, Netflix, etc. can exploit “the long tail”! • Code must be “digitally signed” to run! – Why are we still shipping boxes mostly full of air?! – Piracy concerns! – Consoles supposed to provide safe environment! • Greg Costikyan’s Manifesto! Games! • Unlike PC users who are used to dealing with viruses, spyware, crashing programs! • Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software has been crafting “old- • Manufacturers worried about “untrustworthy” code screwing up school” 2-D and isometric RPGs as his full-time job for people’s consoles! over a decade! • Want to ensure a uniform, “quality” experience! – Exile, Nethergate, Avernum, Geneforge! • They have more lawyers than you! – www.spiderwebsoftware.org! – Makes house payments, feeds kids! 11! 12! 3! 8/24/08! Consoles hostile territory for indie developers (2)! “Serious Games”! • Games for “training” and “education”! • Nintendo NES “pioneered” business model! – First responders: “Hazmat: Hotzone”! – Medicine: “Pulse!!”! – Typical ell consoles at a loss! – Business: “Stone City” for Cold Creamery! – Charge royalty on units manufactured, not units sold! • For indie developers, online distribution (Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, WiiWare, etc.) seems like the least risky option! • Ian Bogost (LCC) doesn’t! like the term “serious games”! Screenshot from! www.gamasutra.com/features/20051102/carless_01b.shtml! www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/apr2006/id20060410_051875.htm! www.persuasivegames.com! 13! 14! “Persuasive Games” & “Games for Change”! Other real-time applications! • Expand the “Serious Games” notion to include broader • Graphics! categories like “advertising,” (advergame), “propaganda,” – MRI in the operating room! “subversion”! • Processing! • The Howard Dean for Iowa game ! – Machine vision! • Disaffected! (not authorized by Kinkos)! • Toshiba demos: real-time face tracking, markerless motion • America’s Army - training, advertising! capture, hand gesture user interface! # # # #or propaganda? ! – U.S. government spent $7 million, but free to play! – made with Unreal Tournament engine! – Data compression/decompression ! • New Toshiba HDTVs will use Cell processors! – Radar signal processing! • 7 SPE Cells -> PS3s; 8 SPE Cells->Mercury Computing blades! Pics from Wikipedia & www.persuasivegames.com! Images from sti.cc.gatech.edu/Slides/Masubuchi-070618.pdf! Info from Ian Bogost, “Persuasive Games”! 15! and http://www.radiology.uiowa.edu/NEWS/Haller-PDF.pdf! 16! 4! 8/24/08! Movie magic! • Hollywood! – Final ray-traced renderings usually done off-line using “render farms”! – Continually improving real-time graphics lets moviemakers more easily experiment via “pre-viz”! • Both on CGI-intensive sequences and live-action sequences! • “Machinima”! – Fans making films using game engines ! thesims2.ea.com/sims2_userdata/16/303316/movie_myimmortal.wmv! 17! 5!.
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